DEFINITION April 2018

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THE GRAND PLAN USER REVIEW

Maybe the newer Venus engines are better in that way. HYBRID LOG GAMMA The GH5S offers HLG as well as their V-Log, which one to use for what will need some more testing but it’s looking that you can get a bit more out of the Hybrid Log Gamma profile than you can out of the V-Log. But for features we’ll probably still be shooting V-Log as that world is slow to change. For The Grand Tour we might just look at changing over to the HLG. It’s great that they’ve got the HLG profile on the camera particular as The Grand Tour is being graded in HDR so I think it’s probably something they’d be keen to use. The new sensor is a little bit bigger physically than the GH5 but more importantly the photo sites are bigger. Because it’s a lower resolution sensor it means that the actual photo sites are about twice the size of the GH5 meaning that the sensitivity is that much greater. This is one of the reasons why ARRI cameras are so good and so popular, the photo sites are much larger than most of their competitors who are mainly chasing resolution. But it’s not all about resolution, it’s about getting light in digital form into the camera. Other features that are needed by the pro video world is the better weather sealing it now has and the increase workable temperature range it has. It has been extended in terms of high and low temperature. The GH4 has been bulletproof as we’ve used those all over the world doing all kinds of horrible things. I’ve never had one ever complaint of it being too hot or too cold. The GH5S is a great camera and we’ve had a superb experience with Panasonic with all the feedback we have channelled to them. It’s also great that we can use the same batteries and accessories. I have 120 batteries and at £70 each I’m very glad the type hasn’t changed!

can absolutely chew through batteries. It’s such a complex

what to use. Timecode is almost always a cost-saving thing.

process recording a 4K video signal, I don’t know how they do it as leanly on power as they do. The fact that they have control over every part of the camera might have something to do with it; they don’t have to work around other manufacturer’s parts. Heat as well all comes into it, all heat is just wasted power and so many of the other cameras get very hot when recording 4K. It was never an issue on the GH4 as that just drew so little power anyway. It didn’t waste that power in heat. None of the GH-series cameras have recorded a Raw video signal and this is not something that we really need in this sector of the market. The fact that they have a 400Mbps option is incredible and allows me to use the GH5S cameras on a forthcoming feature film in India. For things like that you can use the 400Mbps and it should cut easily with your main camera, even something like an ALEXA. If you want to shoot uncompressed you can off-board through HDMI to a recorder that offers that. In terms of shooting in-camera I wouldn’t want anything more to be honest apart from a ProRes option. If they could do that as an activation as they have done with the V-Log on the GH4 which you had to pay for, I think a lot of people would be willing to pay for it although the licenses are expensive. Although getting the Venus engine to process another codec might be a problem and too much of a change to the system.

DUAL ISO Normally when you have a single ISO sensor it’s optimised for everything, it has to cope with very high light and very low light. With a dual ISO system, you’ve got two sets of analogue converters right from where the data comes out of the pixel on the sensor. It can go down either a high-gain or a low-gain route to become a digital signal. You can make the resolution of the conversion much better because you’re not having to cope with the same range of lighting conditions. The fact that it can switch on the fly without you having to manually change it by setting it to Auto is great. So you can seamlessly go from low gain to high gain and it’s very smooth in its transitions between gains. Something I’m looking at for Season 3 is, instead of using the aperture priority mode where it changes the shutter speed to expose the shot automatically, doing that with the gain. But that would need a firmware change where the gain control would use the spot meter, which it currently doesn’t. I think at the moment it takes an average of the frame to adjust the gain automatically. Panasonic are such a big company they make their own camera processors; this is the Venus engine. I don’t know how they do it but the power consumption is so much lower than any of the competition. A battery in one of their cameras can record 4K a very long time where something like the Sony equivalent

IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT RESOLUTION, IT’S ABOUT GETTING LIGHT IN DIGITAL FORM

INTO THE CAMERA

BELOW In-car cinematography for Season 3 will be left to the new GH5s .

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APRIL 2018 DEFINITION

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